Easy automated editing of /etc/files with Augeas

The days of parsing configuration files with awk and making quick changes to configuration files with ad-hoc scripts may finally be at an end. With Augeas you can forget about the parsing and focus completely on what settings must be changed. So if the configuration file moves a piece of data to the fourth column, you don't need to care; Augeas will still show it to you as it did before.

Augeas lets you edit your configuration files from the command line, or from a program you are writing using the native C API or the bindings for Python, Ruby, or OCaml. Augeas is available in the standard Fedora 9 repositories and as a 1-Click install for openSUSE 10.3, but is not packaged for Ubuntu. I compiled it from source on a 64-bit Fedora 8 machine using Augeas version 0.1.1. Installation follows the normal ./configure; make; sudo make install procedure.

If you have executed the ./configure steps above (and as is indicated in the README) then your Augeas setup will probably be useless at first because the files that Augeas uses to recognize configuration files are installed in /usr/local but sought from /usr. The files that describe how to recognize a configuration file are called lens files -- more on them in a moment. You can fix this installation issue by exporting the correct path in AUGEAS_LENS_LIB as shown below. Notice that the first ls command does not show any files directory in its output.

Augeas exposes your configuration files using what can be thought of as two virtual filesystems. The /files path exposes the configuration files, while /augeas exposes metadata. For example, your /etc/hosts file should appear as /files/etc/hosts though Augeas.

Augeas includes support for the aliases, aptsources, fstab, grub, hosts, ifcfg, inittab, pam, sshd, sysconfig, xinetd and yum configuration file formats. You can also add support for editing your own configuration files with Augeas using what it calls lenses. If you are already familiar with text parsing and Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) you will be able to create an Augeas lens for your configuration file without much trouble. If you are not already familiar with EBNF, read up on it and some introductory material on text parsing and formal grammars before trying to create your own lens files. One of the main differences between traditional EBNF definitions and writing a lens for Augeas is that a lens has to be able to be applied to both parse a text file into an abstract syntax tree and also to convert a tree into a plain text file again.

The download page for Augeas includes a warning about Augeas being a prototype and cautions that you may end up with mangled configuration files using it. It offers a "backup" option to the command-line tool, which will preserve your old configuration file when you make changes. It also lets you run Augeas with a system root directory that is not "/". This lets you edit a copy of your configuration file in, say, /tmp/augeas-root/etc/hosts, as a regular user and check that the changes are in line with what they should be before you copy that file into /etc/hosts.

The below commands set up a personal copy of /etc for playing around. The find command makes a tarball of your configuration files from /etc, explicitly excluding the gconf and selinux directories, because they can be huge and are not interesting for quickly testing Augeas.

I discovered at this stage that although the /etc/hosts file is used in the Tour on the Augeas Web site, my hosts file did not show up. It turns out that Augeas did not like my hosts file containing blank lines. Once I removed all of them, I could see my /etc/hosts file though Augeas as shown below.

As the above ls command for the localhost definition shows, if there can be more than one entry for an item, they are indexed with [n] where n is a number. Using the 1,2...n syntax for subdirectories that show the information for each definition in the hosts file might seem to make it hard to check whether there is already an entry for a particular IP address, such as 10.10.10.10. The paths used with Augeas support wildcards and some other things from XPath syntax. The first command shown below will find if there is a definition already for 10.10.10.10 in /etc/hosts. The second command shows the details for this entry. I then create and set an alias for the host directly by using alias[1] in the set command.

The documentation makes reference to the last() function returning the index of the final node. Unfortunately Augeas doesn't yet allow for arithmetic expressions to be used at this location, so my attempt to add a second alias using last()+1 as the index fails. The simple workaround is to first add a new node using the ins command, and then set it using last() to get the index of the last node, which is the one you just added. The last command checks whether an alias exists by using the match command and no indexing at all on the alias path to check against all alias nodes. Finally, I use the save command to make the changes permanent.

Augeas removes a lot of the pain of updating configuration files from scripts. Of course you can always use Perl, awk, grep, wc, and cat to append a new line to a configuration file only if it does not already exist. But as the editing you perform on the configuration file becomes more complex, your script has to jump through more and more hoops to get the edit just right and then make it robust against configuration files that do not appear exactly like the ones you have seen.

While Augeas is a young project, and little things like the blank lines in a /etc/hosts file still seem to throw it off at the moment, it can already make configuration file edits a lot simpler to perform. What's more, once an Augeas lens is updated, then parsing issues like the blank line issue for the hosts file can be resolved in one place for everybody.